My oldest friend is in denial about turning sixty. For once I am ahead of the game (being that much older than she is) and I am able to tell her that she will love every minute. I can also offer my friend the gift of pronouncing to the world that tomorrow is her 60th birthday. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ I hear her saying.

For clarity – and because I know she will want me to tell you – she is not my oldest friend, but the friend I have known for the longest time. I have got older over the many years that we have known each other, and she – annoyingly – has got wiser and more beautiful.

We met each other when we first started at secondary school. I think we bonded over our hideous school uniform; in what world could anyone subject teenage girls to wearing yellow nylon socks and bright yellow blouses? I take it as a huge compliment that, loving our school years as she did, my friend later chose to go back and work at the educational rock face where sartorial elegance was a lesson we were not offered.

We really bonded in our shared A Level classes. There is not much that we did not know about the David Lloyd George years, or the Maginot Line – enter us into any pub quiz. We tested each other on ‘King Lear’ quotes for our final exams and years later she marked my 60th birthday by treating me to Kenneth Branagh (darling) perform this eponymous text in the West End. On reflection, treating my mate to this shabby little blog as her birthday gift is not really on the same level, but, ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.’ She will understand. She always does.

My friend’s parents became my second family in my teenage years – their house was so much tidier than our’s (sorry mum) and in 1983 I sat on their sofa (shoes by the back door because they had clean carpets and wanted to keep them that way) watching the first screening of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller ‘ video. To me this was cutting edge for we had only just got a colour tv and my father was still debating whether ‘Top of the Pops’ was acceptable teenage viewing. My friend’s father offered me a glass of Blue Nun while we waited for the video to air and it was only later that I came to know this tipple as something evil lurking in the dark.

When I went off to university I left without my friend for she had the good sense to start earning straight after A Levels and saved her degree qualification until much later when she naturally pulled off a First. When I was homesick she travelled miles to see me in a remote Welsh university and was far too kind to burst my undergraduate pomposity or to ask me why it never stopped raining. She tells me that she still has all the letters we exchanged during those university years (old school, us) and I console myself that she shared this news in a non-threatening way and that my writing is so illegible so she has probably never wasted time trying to reread these letters.

Post-graduation, when I went to work in London, my friend’s father ensured I kept things real by referring to me – affectionately – as ‘That Yuppy.’ As long as I took my shoes off when I went to visit, I was always allowed access to their drinks cabinet.

My oldest friend was never distracted by all the faffing going on in my own life. While I was off pretending to attend lectures, she was marrying her childhood sweetheart and saving up to buy their first house. There were three in their marriage and they never once made me feel unwelcome. It will sound wrong for me to say that I love my friend’s husband, but I do and she knows it. When my own marriage broke down years later, I sat on their sofa with both of them and they both put me back together. (Thankfully they had moved on from Blue Nun and were able to console me with some highly palatable Malbec).

My friend is much too modest to let me tell you why she is so special, so I will just go rogue on the eve of her birthday and share a few headlines. I am rubbish at telling her directly how important she is to me, but hopefully she will accept this feeble attempt. As my friend is so great at sharing my blog I hope that she will be so busy preparing for her birthday that she will only skim read my post and then unwittingly share the link and blow her own trumpet.

She may be in denial, but my oldest friend is brilliant because:

• She always seems to know what I am thinking and she is the one person who can finish my sentences for me without becoming annoying. She finishes my lines because I have usually lost the thread of where I am meandering to, and she will just know where I am heading.
• She has the largest heart. This heart means that sometimes her eyes start leaking or she may reach over and give you a random hug when she is talking to you because she gets so caught up in the moment.
• Her spirit of adventure is indomitable. This woman has abseiled down Portsmouth’s Spinnaker, fashioned the most incredible over-shoulder-boulder-holder to complete the Moonwalk (that Michael Jackson video went deeper than I realised) and endured a three-legged marathon with her husband.
• She is so flipping intelligent and interesting to talk to. She just instinctively knows so much yet remains so modest. Example: She taught me to go through art exhibitions in two directions saying, ‘ you see paintings differently when you approach them from a different direction,’ and I have used this advice both metaphorically and literally on a recent trip to Ikea.
• She would not even allow cancer to slow her stride, so she allowed her husband to name her ‘inconvenience’ with an ugly name so that we could all tell ‘Mildred’ to ‘sod off’. (Sorry if your name is Mildred). Thankfully, she was able to tell Mildred to ‘go and do one’ and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that my oldest friend ever fought this battle. She is not one to dwell.
• She is my biggest cheer leader. If you have endured my blogs you will need no repeat of the hurdles I have crashed into over the years. You may not realise that it was my best chum who first got me blogging. I think her kick -arse philosophy went along the lines of, ‘stop banging on about writing and show us what you can do.’

Pertinent to this blog, it was also my friend who first shared a dream she had about me. I think she had probably supped a gin or two at the time, but afterwards she called me up to say that in her dream I had a castle in the background and a dragonfly flitting from one shoulder to the other. Over the years we have come to agree that this dream could be interpreted in many ways and that dragonflies can be both a blessing and a curse – the devil’s darning needle and a symbol of transformation – but we also both know that dragonflies have become a metaphor that I have dined out on and the emblem on most of my crockery.

I wish I could be with my mate on her birthday. We live far too far apart, but she will know – because she always knows what I am thinking – that she will be in my heart on her birthday. I hope my friend will never deny me the privilege of remaining my oldest friend. She can ditch the yellow socks but my mate will enter her 60th year with me by her side for I feel we have some stories left to write.